Tim Firth wrote A Man Of Letters,
about a man putting up a giant sign on the side of a building, as a
one-act play in 1991. In 2006, it became the two-act piece Absolutely Frank, which has been slightly revised further to Sign Of The Times. The story has been through nearly as many versions as The Return Of Martin Guerre, and like that musical it still doesn’t buzz and spark the way the mammoth letters do.

It
is not so much a single play as a diptych of one-acters. In the first
act (the original), old hand Frank is holding forth to work experience
teenager Alan, as it gradually becomes apparent that what he is
erecting is not (as he thinks) his employers’ logo but a For Sale sign,
in effect advertising his own redundancy. Act Two is set three years or
so later: Alan is now a management trainee in an electrical retailer’s
in the same building and Frank turns up as a long-term-unemployed
Restart candidate. There is much byplay about the differences between
their generations, rather more about their growing similarities, and
most of all about being true to one’s own spirit and dreams. Much of
the dialogue, especially Frank’s, is written in that self-conscious,
slightly rhetorical but northern-accented dramatic dialect also
familiar as Alan Bennettese or Victoria Wooden. This lends itself well
to the whimsical, sentimental register of the play, which pretends to
recognise contemporary social and economic circumstances even when what
it really offers is platitudinous escapism from them.

After
his career as a television presenter, Matthew Kelly has built a
reputation – initially unexpected by many, but consistently merited –
as an able and dedicated actor in everything from Shakespeare to
Beckett; Frank, however, is the kind of role he could phone in, if
there were any phones on Morgan Large’s stage set. As Alan, Gerard
Kearns from Channel 4’s Shameless
has little more to do in his West End debut than be visibly younger
than Kelly. Nothing about the play or production is bad, but nor is
anything at all distinctive. This show is on; it has Matthew Kelly in
it; the theatre's new loos are very nice. That’s really all that need
be said about it.